Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/482

 A ship is just in from Newcastle, and in both of her great holds eight or ten men are at work shovelling the coal into giant skips, which when full are hoisted by a steam crane over our heads and emptied into trucks. When a train of trucks is full, an engine is attached to it, and away it goes over a viaduct some hundred yards long into a retort-house. If not deposited there for use, the coal is carried through it, across a connecting viaduct, to another house, and so on through half-a-dozen houses if necessary. There are a dozen retort-houses at Beckton, to say nothing of one now building which is to be the largest in the world, and from every one of these, engines and a string of trucks pop in and out like serpents at hide and seek.

In The floor of the retort-house is between the ground and the elevated railway. Underneath are the furnaces which heat the retorts. The latter are somewhat narrow, oval ovens, twenty feet long, opening at both ends. Each furnace heats nine retorts. These when shut are air-tight, so that the gas can escape only by the pipe provided for it. In some retort-houses, as, for instance, one at the South Metropolitan Works in the Old Kent Road, the doors of the retorts are not of the patent perfectly air-tight order. They have consequently to be luted or clayed over. At Beckton all the men have to do is to close and fasten the retort door to render any escape impossible.

As we enter the retort-house three doors have just been opened and a tongue of flame shoots forth. Three men are at work at these. They are honest, white-cuticled Britons, every one of them. But they look for all the world like niggers, save for the absence of the curly hair and a certain coarseness of feature. Their skins are sable and their teeth gleam with a pearly whiteness almost worthy of the race of which Uncle Tom is so famous a member. Some of them wear only trousers, boots, and a skull-cap; others a ragged flannel jersey as well. If the attire seems scanty, it is soon shown to be more than adequate. Each man picks up a rake, that is, an iron rod ten feet long with some six inches turned at the end at right angles. To lift this rake by one end requires no simple effort, but experience is everything. Grasping the handle firmly with both hands, the stoker places the other end in the mouth of the retort, runs it a little way in, and withdraws a quantity of red-hot coke. This falls through an opening in the floor into trucks below, and is destined either to be used again for furnace purposes or to be sold to outside consumers. To quench the red-hot coke, either a hose is turned on to it or it is placed on barrows, as at the South Metropolitan Works, and run under a quadrangular water-pipe, where it receives a shower bath, of which, to judge by the way it spits and hisses, it by no means approves. It is then carried along a viaduct and deposited a tremendous heap in the coke-